Something that people who are not terribly familiar with browsers often don't get is that it's not all about the browser. Content plays a major role. I hear "F

Something that people who are not terribly familiar with browsers often don't get is that it's not all about the browser. Content plays a major role. I hear "Firefox 1.0 was fast and lean and had no bloat" all the time but if you download Firefox 1.0 and run it, you'll find it awfully slow and clumsy. (And the same is true for Chrome 1.0.) So, what's changed. It's the content, stupid. Back in 2004, when Firefox 1.0 shipped, a web page was usually a simple document that was a couple hundred kilobytes. Today, a "web page" is an application that might be multiple megabytes even if it's just a seemingly simple list of status updates. Back in 2004, you might have had one web app, maybe Gmail, open all the time in a tab. Today, you probably have several of these web apps open in tabs all of the time, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, etc. and they're considerably larger and richer than they were 8 years ago. Yes, browsers have added features. But they've also added massive amounts of performance and efficiencies that were absent in earlier browser releases. It's not as simple as "browsers get bloated over time."